• 5 Posts
  • 136 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 27th, 2023
  • blakestacey@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Bad brainwaves: ChatGPT makes you stupidEnglish
    17·
    20 hours ago

    From p. 137:

    The most consistent and significant behavioral divergence between the groups was observed in the ability to quote one’s own essay. LLM users significantly underperformed in this domain, with 83% of participants (15/18) reporting difficulty quoting in Session 1, and none providing correct quotes. This impairment persisted albeit attenuated in subsequent sessions, with 6 out of 18 participants still failing to quote correctly by Session 3. […] Search Engine and Brain-only participants did not display such impairments. By Session 2, both groups achieved near-perfect quoting ability, and by Session 3, 100% of both groups’ participants reported the ability to quote their essays, with only minor deviations in quoting accuracy.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 2025English
    13·
    4 days ago

    “Cursor YOLO deleted everything in my computer”:

    Hi everyone - as a previous context I’m an AI Program Manager at J&J and have been using Cursor for personal projects since March.

    Yesterday I was migrating some of my back-end configuration from Express.js to Next.js and Cursor bugged hard after the migration - it tried to delete some old files, didn’t work at the first time and it decided to end up deleting everything on my computer, including itself. I had to use EaseUS to try to recover the data, but didn’t work very well also. Lucky I always have everything on my Google Drive and Github, but it still scared the hell out of me.

    Now I’m allergic to YOLO mode and won’t try it anytime soon again. Does anyone had any issue similar than this or am I the first one to have everything deleted by AI?

    The response:

    Hi, this happens quite rarely but some users do report it occasionally.

    My T-shirt is raising questions already answered, etc.

    (via)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 2025English
    28·
    9 days ago

    Bringing over aio’s comment from the end of last week’s stubsack:

    This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn’t gotten the message, saying that the project has been “paused”. It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

    Way down in the linked wall o’ text, there’s a comment by “Chaotic Enby” that struck me:

    Another summary I just checked, which caused me a lot more worries than simple inaccuracies: Cambrian. The last sentence of that summary is “The Cambrian ended with creatures like myriapods and arachnids starting to live on land, along with early plants.”, which already sounds weird: we don’t have any fossils of land arthropods in the Cambrian, and, while there has been a hypothesis that myriapods might have emerged in the Late Cambrian, I haven’t heard anything similar being proposed about arachnids. But that’s not the worrying part.

    No, the issue is that nowhere in the entire Cambrian article are myriapods or arachnids mentioned at all. Only one sentence in the entire article relates to that hypothesis: “Molecular clock estimates have also led some authors to suggest that arthropods colonised land during the Cambrian, but again the earliest physical evidence of this is during the following Ordovician”. This might indicate that the model is relying on its own internal knowledge, and not just on the contents of the article itself, to generate an “AI overview” of the topic instead.

    Further down the thread, there’s a comment by “Gnomingstuff” that looks worth saving:

    There was an 8-person community feedback study done before this (a UI/UX text using the original Dopamine summary), and the results are depressing as hell. The reason this was being pushed to prod sure seems to be the cheerleading coming from 7 out of those 8 people: “Humans can lie but AI is unbiased,” “I trust AI 100%,” etc.

    Perhaps the most depressing is this quote – “This also suggests that people who are technically and linguistically hyper-literate like most of our editors, internet pundits, and WMF staff will like the feature the least. The feature isn’t really “for” them” – since it seems very much like an invitation to ignore all of us, and to dismiss any negative media coverage that may ensue (the demeaning “internet pundits”).

    Sorry for all the bricks of text here, this is just so astonishingly awful on all levels and everything that I find seems to be worse than the last.

    Another comment by “CMD” evaluates the summary of the dopamine article mentioned there:

    The first sentence is in the article. However, the second sentence mentions “emotion”, a word that while in a couple of reference titles isn’t in the article at all. The third sentence says “creating a sense of pleasure”, but the article says “In popular culture and media, dopamine is often portrayed as the main chemical of pleasure, but the current opinion in pharmacology is that dopamine instead confers motivational salience”, a contradiction. “This neurotransmitter also helps us focus and stay motivated by influencing our behavior and thoughts”. Where is this even from? Focus isn’t mentioned in the article at all, nor is influencing thoughts. As for the final sentence, depression is mentioned a single time in the article in what is almost an extended aside, and any summary would surely have picked some of the examples of disorders prominent enough to be actually in the lead.

    So that’s one of five sentences supported by the article. Perhaps the AI is hallucinating, or perhaps it’s drawing from other sources like any widespread llm. What it definitely doesn’t seem to be doing is taking existing article text and simplifying it.